Newsletter – Page 42 – DarylCagle.com

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Bob Englehart is a freelance cartoonist and his cartoons are syndicated by Cagle Cartoons.

Tags and Bonnie Timmons, Bernie Fuchs, Brad Holland, Charles W. Morgan, Colonel Green, connecticut, Gary Baseman, Gary Kelley, Gene Hoffman's, Guy Billout, Jack Davis, Jack Unruh, John D. Driggs, Lou Brooks, Mystic Seaport, Peter deSeve, R. O. Blechman, Seymour Chwast

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Be True To Your (Art) School

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 26, 2019

Our CagleCartoonist, Bob Englehart writes more about his cool career. Support Bob on Patreon, See Bob’s Cartoon Archive, E-mail Bob

I visited my alma mater last week in Chicago, the American Academy of Art. Man, has it changed. When I went there from 1964 to 1966, it was a small commercial art school dedicated to the practical side of art (that is, how to make money). It offered a two or three year course and a frame-able certificate upon completion. It was on the corner of Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop. The first year was about teaching fundamentals and the second and third year was about specialties: illustration, oil painting, watercolor, layout, design and so on and was geared to industry demand for artists. It had no cartoon course, so in the middle of my second year when I decided I wanted to become a cartoonist, my fundamentals teacher, Mr. Staake, designed a course for me. He had me drawing greeting cards and anything he could think of that might sharpen my skills as a budding cartoonist. One of my assignments was to draw a political cartoon. I drew it in the style of Bill Mauldin who was my favorite political cartoonist at the time.

The greeting card assignment led to work as a freelance greeting card cartoonist that paid for my first house and my second one, too. The political cartoon became a sample I used to get a job in the art department of The Chicago Herald American. It also inspired me to draw my first political cartoon for the paper shortly after it changed its name to Chicago Today.

The story: a KKK cell was discovered in the Chicago Police Department. The art director of the paper had given me permission to publish an occasional political cartoon on Mondays when the regular political cartoonists, Vaughn Shoemaker and Wayne Stayskal were off. I was walking across the Michigan Avenue Bridge when a gust of wind blew a woman’s skirt and the idea popped in to my brain.

I’m happy to say the academy still delivers a practical education in art. I won’t tell you what the tuition was back in 1964 because it would break your heart. Today, the tuition is comparable to a four-year private college, which is what most art schools are. The academy is now on Michigan Ave. It has student housing and offers nine bachelors of fine arts degrees in traditional areas of art such as painting and drawing but also in 3-D modeling, digital illustration, art direction and more.

A number of famous and successful alumni are making a nice living in comic books, posters, painting, sculpture, design, advertising and graphic arts but the most famous is Kanye West. I talked to Kanye’s teacher and he said Kanye was a talented artist. The teacher told him he could have a fine career as an artist, but Kanye said he had this music thing he wanted to try.

Read Bob’s other posts:

My One-Day Career as a Courtroom Artist

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

The Birth of a Political Cartoonist

Please support us to keep Cagle.com free and keep the endangered editorial cartoons coming! Visit Cagle.com/Heroes!

We need your support!

Tags American Academy of Art, Bob Englehart, Chicago Today, design, illustration, Kanye West, layout, Mauldin, oil painting, The Chicago Herald American, Wabash and Adams streets in the Loop, watercolor

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I’m Emerging From My Hermit Lair to Give a Lecture!

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 21, 2019

It is rare that I come out of hiding to give a talk, but I will do that on Monday September 23rd at Art Center College in Pasadena. I’ll be speaking at Michael Dooley’s comics history class; I’ll show lots of my work and explain how everything I do works. Here’s the announcement – it is open to the public and free.

I met Michael at our local National Cartoonists Society Los Angeles Chapter where I heard about his impressive class at Art Center; the class is titled, “Design History of Comics and Animation”. Michael brings in lots in interesting guest speakers, who he announces on his Facebook page. I’m going to start going to these, they look great.

I’ll talk about my varied career, as an illustrator in New York, as a toy inventor, as a political cartoonist, and now running a little syndicate. I’ll cover the world scene for editorial cartoons (internationally our art form is much more highly regarded than it is here). And we’ll have lots of time for questions – Michael wants to talk about the future of editorial cartooning and how the business works. OK.

I guessing the crowd will be small, so if you can make it to Pasadena, don’t hesitate to come and ask lots of questions! Its FREE and open to the public!

Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com:

When I was President, PART THREE of three

When I was President, PART TWO of three

Baptists, Gay Marriage, Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, Bert and Ernie

Answering a College Student’s Questions about Cartoons

Tags Art Center College od Design, class, Daryl Cagle, Design History of Comics and Animation, lecture, Michael Dooley, toy inventing

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Why I Started Drawing

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 19, 2019

Learn why my cartoonist buddy Randy Enos started drawing!

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

It all started with the son of my father’s best friend, Jose. The kid’s name was Jerry and he was about my age. I must have been 8 or 9 when Jerry seriously stole my father’s affection by being very skilled at drawing. Jerry would go to the zoo, come back home and draw all the animals from memory. My father would rave about these drawings.

As I mentioned in another story, I would read the comics every Sunday with my dad and he would pour over the details of the drawing in the strips. He didn’t know much about art but wanted to. So this kid, Jerry, was encroaching on my territory with my father. One day, my father showed me a pencil drawing of an ear of corn that Jerry had made. It was, honestly, pretty damn good, with lots of neat shading and detail. My dad said that Jerry was taking classes at The Swain School of Design, New Bedford’s only art school. He asked if maybe I’d like to take some classes there. I wanted to get some of that admiration from my dad, so I went to the Swain school one summer and it was the most boring, tedious and frustrating experience of my life. The only thing I remember about the teacher was that he had one eye that refused to look in the same direction as the other one, which was a little unnerving. I was forced to hone my pencil to a wedge shape with a sandpaper block and then to draw smooth, even, parallel strokes close together. I filled page after page of these pencil strokes only to be told that they weren’t up to par. We also made strokes that graduated from light to dark –over and over and over again. We would not be allowed to draw anything else until we mastered these exercises. I was failing miserably. I quit.

When I was about 10, I think, I was walking with a fellow classmate, Barbara Camara, down at the bottom of the street where I lived and where her father had a hardware store. All of a sudden, I saw a new little shop that hadn’t been there before. It was just a tiny place next to the hardware store. It was a store front with two windows, one on either side of the doorway. It seemed to be the studio/shop of a commercial artist. A small sign said “Art Lessons”. I went in and met the artist inside seated at a drawing board. He told me the price of lessons. It wasn’t very much. I rushed home and told my dad and he agreed to me taking some lessons there.

This was a whole other world from the Swain school. I went down to the shop once or twice a week and the guy sat me on a stool at a drawing board right next to his and encouraged me to draw anything I wanted. I wish I could remember his name but it escapes me. He gave me India ink and a brush and a pen with which to draw. I told him what interested me and he helped me in that direction. Milton Caniff was making a big impression on me at that time so our efforts were on replicating some facsimile of Caniff’s brushwork. I didn’t know cartoonists used brushes as well as pens until this fellow told me about it. He showed me how to draw half-lock folds. He showed me how to crosshatch. He inspired the hell out of me. He had a friend who often dropped by and they would include me in their “art talk”. I realized, at a certain point, that their main source of work was in drawing the corny little spots you see in the phone book. They were two very small-time commercial artists but they had big hearts and they shared my enthusiasm about drawing and comics etc.. I was finally getting excited about the world of art and illustrating and cartooning. They showed me books and discussed the leading artists of the day.

One memorable sunny day, they said that they were going out to paint watercolors in the outdoors. They asked me if I wanted to go along. Do bears do poo poo in the woods? Of course I wanted to go along and paint with two professional artists, so off we went. We arrived at a farm house. We trudged out into a field and split up, each finding something interesting to paint. So, I’m there with my little watercolor box and my brushes and I settle down to paint the barn I see before me. Halfway into my very enjoyable foray into the plein arts, I became aware of a presence off a way to my left. I turned my head to see a big cow bearing down me! I had never had a large cow bearing down on me before and didn’t quite know what to do about it. She very determinably strode directly at me and was gaining speed all the while. I leaped up and stepped away from my watercolors, brushes and watercolor pad which were on the ground. The cow didn’t seem interested in me but, rather my painting of the barn, because she didn’t come at me anymore, but strode directly at my painting and stopped. She lowered her head to my picture. Then, this giant cow tongue came out of her mouth and slurped across my freshly painted watercolor. Then, she looked at me and walked back from whence she came. My watercolor had this big “splootch” right across the barn.

Afterwards, I enjoyed showing people the watercolor that a cow helped me paint.

And, Oh … remember Jerry back up there in the beginning of this story, the kid who was a drawing genius ? He became a car mechanic and never drew any more.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags art school, commercial art, cow, drawing, half-lock folds, Milton Caniff, New Bedford, Randall Enos, Randy Enos, Swain School of Design, watercolor

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World’s Fastest Illustrator

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 17, 2019

Here’s another piece from my cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos –the fastest illustrator in the world.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

For many, many years my working hours were from about 10:00 in the morning until 4:00 the next morning, with breaks for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This was in the late 50’s into the late 90’s … then things slowed down a bit.

In the early years, I would often travel to New York to deliver jobs and to pick up work. Sometimes the regular work I would pick up from The New York Times and N.B.C. in particular, were jobs that were “overnight jobs”. I would rush home, do the jobs until 4:00 in the morning, sleep and wake up about 10 or 11 then go on the train to deliver them. I loved working at night. I would play movies that I would rent, while I was working. Sometimes, I would be so intensely working on the job that I wouldn’t even look up to see a single scene, I would just listen to the sound. I rented so many movies (and got additional free ones from the library) that I became a favored customer at several video stores and would get invited to their private office parties. I was renting 2 or 3 movies, EVERY day. I preferred listening to movies rather than music.

I never missed a deadline but had some harrowing moments sometimes in the middle of the night thinking that I wasn’t going to make it. My solution for that was to create a little schedule for myself. I had picked a complicated medium to work in because I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree. I invented this linocut-collage thing which included printing a carved lino block on many different colored papers (Pantone papers) in many different colored inks (water soluble Speedball) and then cutting portions of each print and pasting it all together… a hard to describe complicated procedure which netted me a unique style of my own which was unlike anybody else’s (no other illustrator would be stupid enough to go through a process like this into the wee hours of the morning). SO, here’s the kind of schedule I would quickly write out to assuage my fears of not being able to finish before the morning’s train time.

Only with my more complex and “scary” jobs would I make out a schedule like this. The ones that I thought I’d never be able to do in one night.

9 pm to 10 pm… make a sketch for the illustration.

10 pm to 11 pm… transfer the sketch to my lino block.

11 pm to 2 am… cut the block (or blocks, because I would often have more than one illustration to work on at a time).

2 am to 2:30 am… rest break (watch some of the movie).

2:30 am to 3: 30 am… ink the block (or blocks) and print on colored papers.

3:30 am to 5:00 am… dry the prints (in my little studio microwave) and cut them out with X-acto knife and paste up the illustration.

5:00 am to 7:00 am… do any retouching that would be necessary etc.. Put a flap on it and stick it into an envelope.

DONE.

When I could see that there was ample time to go through all my processes, right in front of me, the panic would subside as long as I kept to the schedule.

As I said, a lot of the time I would have more than one illustration to work on at a time. Six seemed to be my magic number. I always seemed to have six jobs on the board to do. As soon as one would be checked off, another had replaced it. Also, when I looked at a magazine or newspaper stand, I could, almost always, count at least six publications that I was in at any given time. In my 63 years, I’ve worked for every American magazine except The New Yorker. I even did an illustration for People and they don’t even carry illustrations. Have you ever seen one in there?

I never did any advertising work (unless you count the very “editorial” nature of my NBC illustrations), but, rather, I was in the low paying but much freer and more interesting world of editorial illustration (books, magazines and newspapers). And the money was all over the place from doing a small spot illustration for the back pages of Time magazine for $1000 to elaborate double-page spreads for The National Lampoon or Progressive magazine for $150 – $200. I never thought about the money (my wife says that’s a major problem with me) and put just as much energy and time into the low paying jobs as I did for the higher paying ones –sometimes more. And, I never turned a job down because, unlike other illustrators, I didn’t care about playing tennis or golf or going on vacations. I only cared about making pictures. On beautiful hot and sunny days, I was only happy if I was in my basement studio with some juicy jobs to work on.

In those days, I used to bill myself as “The World’s Fastest Illustrator”!

Time magazine had the habit of giving out rush jobs and sending a driver out to Westport to pick it up. That could be harrowing. I once got one of those jobs. No time for a sketch to be approved or anything. I worked out what I was going to do with the art director over the phone. Then he would say, “Okay Randy, the driver is setting out now to pick it up!” Then I would quickly draw my illustration onto my block and start cutting away at it, all the time with the vision in my mind’s eye of the driver on the Merritt Parkway heading toward me. Fortunately, it would take him almost an hour.

Okay, here’s the fastest job I ever did. My next door neighbor was the editor of Fairfield County Magazine. She called me from work and said that she had a quick job for me. She had some photos of lawn furniture and wanted me to just draw on them with pen and ink and make the chairs and tables into cartoon characters. She said she’d drop off the photos on the way home that night. Later, she came to my door with an envelope with the photos. I took them and rushed over to my drawing board as she left and quickly drew arms and legs and heads on the photos and went out the door and gave them to her as she was putting her key into her front door. Time elapsed… under a minute!

Some of the fastest illustrations I had to do were for The Wall Street Journal, which I like to call The Wall Street Gerbil. Back in the black and white days before there were any color illustrations in the newspapers (I did the first color illustration for them later on) we used to FAX the originals, Believe it or not!

On the other hand, I had a client who never had a deadline. Let me repeat that… NO DEADLINE… ever. It was the Boy Scout magazine, Boy’s Life.

The art director, Joe Connolly would call me up and ask me if I could do the job and that he would be sending me the text. It would always be one major full-page illustration and three smaller ones for each story. At the end of our conversations, he would say, “And, as always, Randy, there’s no deadline!” Boy’s Life was one of my highest paying clients but the stories had practically no content with which to work. They were void of any substance. I defy any average illustrator to get even one idea for an illustration never mind three! It’s a good thing I wasn’t an average illustrator because I did them for many years. Joe would just hand out and stockpile up the illustrated stories until he needed them for an issue. And he used top illustrators so I was in good company.

On one occasion, I slipped his manuscript under a pile of other stuff because I knew there was no immediate rush and went on to other projects. It stayed there for a WHOLE YEAR!!! Joe called me up and I suddenly remembered the long lost manuscript that I had forgotten about. I stammered, “Oh jeez, Joe, I forgot about the story … I’ll get to it right away!” He said, “No no no, there’s no deadline, I’m just calling you with another job!” You don’t find clients like that very often.

I used to do a lot of work for McGraw-Hill magazines. Some of it was tedious, mundane sort of things. One massive job I had, involved me putting down lots of Prestype lettering. God, what a nightmare! The lettering would crack or pull off or go down crooked and I struggled for hours and hours doing that tedious rush job. I stayed up without sleep for TWO nights and was going on to my third night (the job was due the next morning) when I just pooped out. I couldn’t go on any longer… I needed to sleep. I just gave up at one point and said, “I can’t do it, I’ve got to sleep” and promptly passed out. I awoke in the morning and went into panic mode. It was minutes before train time. I rushed into my studio to find the job sitting there… completely finished!! My wife had been watching what I had been doing and while I slept, she finished the job beautifully.

I knew there was a reason I married her beside the fact that she was a cutie-pie!

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags Boy's Life, Fairfield County Magazine, illustration, Joe Connelly, McGraw-Hill magazines, Randall Enos, The New York Times, the wall street journal

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Me and the Ghostbusters

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 14, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos writes about the Ghostbusters –Randy was one of the regular contributors to The National Lampoon.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Toward the last gasps of The National Lampoon, there began a migration of Lampoon editors, publishers and associates of the Lampoon empire to Hollywood. Doug Kenney, one of the founders went out there and unfortunately died in Hawaii. People like John Belushi, who had been involved in Lampoon stuff in New York went to Hollywood along with Matty Simmons the Lampoon publisher and Ivan Reitman and made Animal House. It seemed like lots of Lampoon people suddenly got the Hollywood movie bug. My close friend and art director Michael Gross moved his family to Hollywood and became a producer for Ivan Reitman’s films. One of their most notable being Ghostbusters.

Through all of Michael’s endeavors, the Lampoon, his subsequent foray into his own design firm, some art directing for Esquire, art directing for Mobil Oil and a brief experiment with an artistic porno site, I was always there to supply him with my art work. So it was with Ghostbusters. He called on me, from California to do a fake Atlantic Magazine cover for the movie. At that point in my career, I had yet to do an actual Atlantic cover.

In the film, after the boys get their Ghostbuster business established, they get quite famous and a brief sequence in the film is a montage, of sorts showing headlines in various newspapers, cover of Life magazine and a cover of the Atlantic Magazine all popping and panning across the screen accompanied by the famous “Who ya gonna call?” theme song. I was to show caricatures of the three “busters” in their uniforms and Proton Packs chasing a ghost.

In a stupendous display of over-kill, four fairly large cardboard boxes arrived at my house. One box contained dozens and dozens of pictures of Bill Murray, and another, pictures of Dan Aykroyd and another of Harold Ramis, the three main stars. I had shots of them close-up, at every angle and full figure –in their costumes and out of them. The fourth box was loaded with pictures of them posed together in various action shots. A caricaturists’ dream of reference material!

I set to work and created a sketch for approval and then when I got the okay, I did the finished art in linocut. Michael slapped an Atlantic logo on it and some type and made it look exactly like an Atlantic cover. We had done many fake jobs like this for the Lampoon, of course, so we knew how to do this stuff. Then, to my surprise, the fake cover had to go to The Atlantic for approval which it secured and into the movie it went. It only appears for a few seconds. It zips onto the screen… holds and then zips off. It was a kick to see it on the big screen.

I let Ivan Reitman have the original which I saw framed and hanging in his office when I visited Michael later on at the studios in Hollywood. I also got to see some of the models of the ghost creatures and an actual Proton Pack which was a bit of a disappointment in the flesh being that it was basically cardboard with duct tape wrapped around stuff. Michael also showed me the head of the moose he created for The Lampoon’s Vacation movie where Chevy Chase has to punch the moose character in the nose. The head was a hard plaster but the nose was soft.

Michael often came to New York to shoot parts of films and my wife Leann and I would always go into the city and watch the action. He even gave Leann an “extra” part in Legal Eagles. He also came in for the premier of Animal House where they had a party at the Village Gate afterwards and Belushi and Aykroyd performed a song as “The Blues Brothers” –AND, I got to meet one of my heroes, Ralph Nader, of all people.

But, after all that exciting stuff, the very best thing about the whole experience was that I now get to say, “My very first Atlantic cover was not an Atlantic cover”.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

When I was President, PART TWO of three

Tags Animal House, Atlantic Magazine, Dan Aykroyd, Doug Kenney, Esquire, Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, John Belushi, Life magazine, Matty Simmons, Michael Gross, The National Lampoon

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Still More of When I was President

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 13, 2019

Here is part three of my story about my time as NCS president. Read part ONE and part TWO of the story. –Daryl Cagle

Arnold Roth did the theme art for my second convention, in Boca Raton, Florida, to support the International Museum of Cartoon Art.

I continued my “wedding planner” role as NCS president in my second year, and started work on planning my second convention.

At the time, Mort Walker was running a cartoon museum in Boca Raton, Florida. The museum was lovely, but struggling. The collection had originally been housed in a charming, concrete castle in Portchester, New York and I visited there frequently when I lived in NYC and Connecticut. The move to Florida was tough on the museum which was having trouble paying the mortgage on their new building, and having trouble drawing a crowd in their new location.

My first NCS convention at New York’s World Trade Center turned a profit of something more than $30,000.00. In those days the NCS kept a “prudent reserve” of about $250,000.00 on hand –enough to cover a convention that goes wrong, and now the reserve was pushing $300,000.00. With some new money burning a hole in our pockets, I asked the board to give a $30,000.00 donation to Mort’s struggling, Florida museum. Some people objected to the NCS’s donation. The loudest critic was Wiley Miller, who draws the comic “Non-Sequitur.” Wiley publicly and loudly resigned from the NCS, on the pages of Editor & Publisher magazine, because of the donation, which he described as a “misappropriation of funds,” and he later went on to draw a series of comics depicting me as a rotund, evil character, doing various dastardly things, in the newspaper comics pages. (Wiley spent a few years in the wilderness, then rejoined the NCS, and later went on to win the Reuben Award.)

Mort’s Museum of Cartoon Art as it used to be when I visited often, in Portchester, NY.

Cartoonists can be a grouchy bunch. Over time, volunteer organizations gather people who carve out niches for themselves and most of the rancor I faced as president was related to people defending a patchwork of old turf they had claimed, or thought they deserved. Some of the acrimony spilled into chat boards and social media. I didn’t win all of the battles. A big turf battle I lost was about the NCS’s longtime attorney who I wanted to fire. NCS old-timers threatened to give me major trouble if I canned their lawyer buddy, and I backed down. I ended the relationship with the NCS’s beloved travel agent, and the hefty travel agency fees on our hotel room blocks were redirected into paying our new management company’s fees. Our board was rowdy and we voted to kick one board member off of the board. I had a growing list of vocal detractors who complained loudly when I stepped on their toes. I have a pretty thick skin though, and I stirred the steamy cartoonist pot when I thought it needed stirring.

The International Museum of Cartoon Art, as it used to be in Boca Raton, Florida.

THE SECOND CONVENTION

Cartoonists in Ohio made a strong case for the next convention to be held in Cleveland, and my wife, Peg, and I did a site visit there. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer newspaper made a generous donation to the NCS to woo us. The Ohio cartoonists had proposed a hotel and made preliminary arrangements for a party at the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame. Then I got calls from Mort Walker and King Features, who were proposing that the next convention be held at Mort’s International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton, Florida.

Mort’s cartoon museum was near death. King Features proposed generous support for both the NCS and the museum by offering to throw a big party at the museum, if we brought the convention to Boca Raton. Mort and King Features thought the museum needed the publicity and a show of support from the cartoonists. Losing the museum would be a blow to our profession, and I had to agree. The NCS had held the Reubens convention in Boca Raton a few years earlier, when the museum building was under construction, but this looked like it might be the last opportunity to do what we could do to save the museum.

We had a lovely party in 2001 at the International Museum of Cartoon Art, but the museum later failed, just as we had feared. At one point, they even considered using only half of the space, and renting out the other half to a “Museum of the Holocaust” that was looking for a home in Boca Raton. I suggested that they make a revolving sign, Mickey Mouse on one side, inviting everyone to the Cartoon Museum, rotating with the Holocaust on the other side – but alas, someone must have thought the two museums weren’t a good fit.

We did a roast of cartoonist Mike Peters at my second convention.

The convention went well. Steve McGarry directed both the show at the Saturday night Reuben Awards, and a Sunday roast of cartoonist Mike Peters. I learned that many NCSers do an excellent impression of Mike Peters, including Jeff Keane who dislocated his shoulder while running up the steps to the stage, and hid the pain so the audience never knew that he was suffering. When Jeff left the stage, he was rushed off to a hospital. What a pro! Mike Luckovich took over the emcee roll for Reubens night, living up to the high standard established by Bil Keane over the course of many years. Mike did a great job, saving the day again.

I think this is a self-portrait of Arnie.

I had a huge presidential suite at the Boca Raton Resort & Club, something hotels throw in as part of a big room block. These crazy suites seem like a fun perk, but they are a burden. Though they are given to the president, they are really being given to the NCS which means there should be a party in the big room all the time, even when I want to sleep. I got a separate, regular hotel room where I actually slept, and where I could make a mess without worrying that someone might walk in.

I asked Arnie Roth to do the theme art for the convention, and I enjoyed working with Arnie as I did with Jack Davis the year before. This is the best part of the NCS president’s job. I also wrote a column in each of our newsletters and a different artist drew my portrait for each column, so I collected a bunch of great portraits. And the board gave me a lovely Jeff MacNelly original as a parting gift; it hangs in my living room.

THE CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL

The Congressional Gold Medal for Charles M. Schulz was an important award for the whole cartooning profession to show that cartoons are not “frivilous.”

Near the end of my tenure, my attention turned back to Sparky. I got a call from Senator Dianne Feistein’s office asking for help. The Senator had authored legislation that would give the Congressional Gold Medal to Sparky posthumously; this was America’s highest civilian honor and Sparky would be the only cartoonist in history to receive it. The bill should have sailed through the Senate, but it was being blocked by one senator, conservative, Republican Jesse Helms from North Carolina. Senator Feinstein had tried everything she could and was looking for help. Helms objected because he thought the award was “frivilous.” This was an important award for the whole cartooning profession to show that cartoons are not “frivilous.” Helms wouldn’t budge and it looked like the Gold Medal was going nowhere.

I reached out to a bunch of cartoonists asking if they had any contacts or ideas on how to twist Helms’ arm and I found Marie Woolf, a talented cartoonist whose work I syndicated back when my CagleCartoons.com syndicate was young. Marie had previously worked for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah; she called Hatch and made an impassioned plea for help. Marie asked me to have the NCS send a huge, red white and blue “patriotic” bouquet of flowers to Hatch’s office, which I did. That patriotic bouquet was a whopper.

Senator Hatch turned out to be a nice guy and a cartoon fan. He later wrote a forward for my Best Political Cartoons of the Year 2006 book. Tucker Carlson wrote a forward too, and he’s also a cartoon fan and a nice guy. (That’s crazy talk from a liberal cartoonist like me.)

It turned out that Hatch was a cartoon fan; he twisted Helm’s arm and Helms backed down, clearing the way for the Gold Medal –so the credit for the Gold Medal really belongs to Marie Woolf and Orrin Hatch. The House and Senate approved the award with only one dissenting vote, from Congressman Ron Paul of Texas. Hatch turned out to be a nice guy, and he later wrote a forward for my Best Political Cartoons of the Year 2006 book. There was a lovely Congressional Gold Medal celebration in Washington, but alas, by the time the Gold Medal party happened, I was no longer NCS president, and I missed out on the celebration.

By the time my presidential term came to an end, each of my Reuben conventions had turned a good profit; I inherited the NCS in good financial shape and left it in better shape. The new management company was collecting the membership dues properly, had cleaned up the records, and acclimated to the idiosyncrasies of our quirky needs; they were well-positioned to take on much of the work of future NCS events. I had cleared out much of the patchwork of claimed turf. We had raised expectations for more ambitious Reubens weekends. And, frankly, my wife Peg did most of my work.

Even though this all happened twenty years ago, it still makes me feel tired when I think about it; but I have lots of nice trophies and memories from the experience and I continue to enjoy the NCS as a civilian.

Some cartoonists complain that they don’t “get anything” from the NCS –what they get is the opportunity to hang with their colleagues and meet their cartoon heroes. I wholeheartedly recommend that all professional cartoonists join the NCS, visit the NCS site for more information about joining.

Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com:

Baptists, Gay Marriage, Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, Bert and Ernie

Answering a College Student’s Questions about Cartoons

Still More of When I was President, PART THREE of three

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More of When I was President

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 12, 2019

Here is part TWO of my three part account of my years as NCS president. Read part ONE and part THREE of the story. –Daryl Cagle

Jack Davis’ lovely theme art for the NCS 2000 convention shows King Kong on the World Trade Center towers, along with the comics characters waving goodbye as Snoopy flies off with the posthumous lifetime achievement award trophy for Sparky.

This is the story of my first Reuben Awards convention as National Cartoonists Society (NCS) president, in 2000.

We wanted to do a 50th anniversary of Peanuts celebration, but hotel construction put the plans for a Santa Rosa convention on hold. United Media, the syndicate that owned Peanuts, was located in Manhattan, and NCS conventions draw the biggest crowds when they are in New York City, so I decided to do the 2000 convention in New York. My wife, Peg and I flew to New York twice and visited a half dozen prospective hotels. We got competing bids from three hotels and spent a month haggling prices with all three before deciding on the World Trade Center Marriott in lower Manhattan, which gave us a great deal on Memorial Day weekend, when lower Manhattan is traditionally deserted. Before that, the NCS usually had their Reuben Awards on Mothers Day weekend. I got some angry blasts of criticism from old NCSers in New York who thought it was outrageous to have the convention in lower Manhattan because it should have been in Midtown, where it always used to be. “Nobody wants to go downtown!” they told me.

The convention was extra difficult because our previous management company had crashed and burned soon after I became president. I had just hired a new management company, but they didn’t want to run the convention because they hadn’t gotten to know the NCS yet; they wanted to come to their first NCS Reubens event just to observe. My wife Peg ended up doing nearly all of the organizing work that we would usually expect a management company to do: starting with handling registrations and tracking all the payments, making seating charts and dealing with menus, responding to the many special requests, arguing about hotel bills and comps, manning the convention registration desk throughout the weekend, and serving as the bouncer for those who overstayed their welcome in the Presidential Suite. I couldn’t have done it without Peg. (And the new management company folks were good sports; they ended up pitching in on site –more than they first planned.)

The convention would be a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Peanuts. Charles M. Schulz (“Sparky”) was on board with it; United Media was delighted and generously offered to cover the cost of a big Sunday brunch for everyone at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower. Political cartoonist, Mike Luckovich stepped up and was a tremendous help; he did all the organizational work of getting the newspaper comic strip artists to draw 50th anniversary of Peanuts strips on the same Saturday that our banquet was held, when we planned to give our lifetime achievement award to Sparky.

All seemed to be going well when we received the terribly sad news that Sparky had died in February. With all the Peanuts celebration stuff planned for May, 2000, and with the commitments I had already made in the hotel contract, I thought we might be in trouble. We ended up having the biggest NCS convention ever, kicking off with a grand opening cocktail reception on the 2nd floor promenade of the North Tower lobby.

Mike Luckovich contacted all the newspaper comic strip cartoonists and got them to draw Peanuts “tribute cartoons” for that Saturday, rather than the Peanuts anniversary cartoons we had planned earlier. The tributes in the “funny pages” were great, and I was walking around the convention the whole time, with my cell phone on my ear, giving interviews to journalists who were writing about the big newspaper comics tribute. We gave the lifetime achievement award to Sparky posthumously.

Steve McGarry and Jeff Keane both have previous show business experience and ran the shows for the first time, raising our production quality to levels the NCS hadn’t seen before. Bil Keane, Jeff’s dad who drew The Family Circus comic, was a very funny guy; he had been the emcee of the Reubens for many years, but at his insistence, this was going to be his last year as Reuben emcee. Steve had the idea to do a Bil Keane Roast on the Sunday night, which led to a repeat of the King Features/Mort Walker kerfuffle, this time with King objecting to the Bil Keane Roast –Bil liking the Roast idea, and King adopting a positive tone again, becoming a second big sponsor, and paying for dinner before the Roast. Steve’s Roast of Bil involved lots of cartoonists doing skits and was great fun.

There were other fun things that happened. I’m a big David Levine fan, and he was a speaker, so I got to meet him. We had a panel of features editors from top newspapers across America talking about the comics (that’s something that would never happen today). There was an odd debate in the NCS at that time about seminars at the conventions, which were still a new part of the Reubens weekend; some old-timers thought the conventions should only consist of parties and objected to seminars. I was “pro-seminar” and pushed lots of seminars into the schedule. RJ Matson managed the many seminars and did a great job.

What is most fun about being the NCS president is that the president gets to “commission” the Reuben weekend artwork; I called my first choice, who graciously agreed, which gave me the delightful opportunity to serve as art director to the legendary Jack Davis. I love Jack’s work and I grew up looking forward to his art in each new issue of Mad Magazine; it was great fun to work with him on this. He was such a Southern gentleman. Jack Davis was, and always will be, my cartoonist hero.

My kids, Susie and Michael, were 16 and 10 years old at the time, and starting with the site visit, they had gotten to know the World Trade Center well, hanging around the shopping mall and becoming well acquainted with every nook and cranny of the entire complex. Susie danced with Jack Davis on Reubens night, and both kids went to most of the seminars.

This is how the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel looked for our convention in 2000.

There were also plenty of nervous moments. There were over 630 people at the banquet (a typical Reuben banquet size is half that size). Several local cartoonists waited until the last minute, that Saturday, to decide they wanted to come, and showed up at the hotel to register on site for the dinner. No one was turned away, though it meant continually juggling seating and adding extra chairs to numerous tables. The ballroom was filled beyond capacity and the new management company people got nudged out of the banquet, so more NCSers and guests could have their seats. We were lucky the fire marshal didn’t make a visit.

We always had a live band in those days, so I hired a band that the old-timers liked; one that had played for the NCS years ago when the Reuben Awards dinner was a single night at the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. The band didn’t show up until the exact minute that the show was set to begin. I learned that if you want the band to be in place before the show starts, you have to pay them more for those few extra minutes.

The Sunday brunch at Windows on the World ran well over budget, with open bars and cartoonists who will drink everything they see. United Media contracted for the brunch directly, so the bill of well over $100,000.00 went directly to United Media (thank goodness). It was a great, boozy brunch, but chilling in retrospect. All of the staff at the Windows on the World restaurant were trapped above where the airliner hit the building on 9/11/2001, and the employees who served us brunch did not survive the attack.

This is how the hotel looked in 2001, after the 9/11 attacks.

When the Twin Towers fell, the entire 22-story Marriott was also destroyed. Most of the hotel staff got out safely, but forty people reportedly died there, primarily firemen who were using the hotel as a staging area. While it was a shock to the entire world to see the towers and hotel fall, the fact that this had recently been home to our convention and a playground for my kids made it feel personal. Marriott chose not to rebuild the hotel and the site is now a part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

I look back on our convention at the World Trade Center with both warmth and chills.

Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com

More of When I was President, PART TWO of three

Baptists, Gay Marriage, Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, Bert and Ernie

Answering a College Student’s Questions about Cartoons

Still More of When I was President, PART THREE of three

News Newsletter Syndicate

When I was President

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 11, 2019

This is the first of three columns about my years as president of the National Cartoonists Society. Read part TWO here. Read part THREE here. –Daryl Cagle

This drawing by Jack Davis shows Snoopy with Sparky’s “Milton Caniff” Lifetime Achievement Award.

I’ve been a member of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) for nearly 40 years. I was president of the NCS from June, 1999 to May, 2001, and I ran two “Reuben Awards” conventions. The first was held at the World Trade Center in Manhattan the year before the towers were destroyed, and the second in Florida at the Boca Raton Resort and Club. Much of the work of the NCS president is like being a wedding planner, with all the joys, stresses and horrors that implies, which left me with an odd perspective on our colorful profession. Here are my recollections …

Twenty years ago the membership of the NCS included nearly twice as many professional cartoonist members as it does now, and popular newspaper comic strips were the NCS’s strength. The group was rancorous and my years in the hot seat were toasty. We had a crisis at the start when our management company demanded that we triple their fees; they were doing a terrible job so I fired them and I went about finding a new firm, arguing with our board members who wanted to stay with the old management company and pay the higher fees. Finding a new management company for our unusual group was a big chore, because of the unusual nature of our group compared to more conventional professional organizations.

When the new company eventually took over, the old firm transferred our records and I was told that our files looked like someone climbed to the top of a nine foot ladder and randomly dropped the papers into the boxes. It turns out that we didn’t have records of past members’ dues payments – we didn’t know who was paid up and who wasn’t. It became clear why the old management company was doing a lousy job. It was a big mess to clean up the records and to make sense of the membership dues collections; I faced a challenging learning curve of getting myself and the new management company up to speed.

I had a “wedding” to deal with right away. In those days, the NCS had a big, annual Christmas party in Manhattan, often at the Century Club. We planned our biggest Christmas party ever, with the theme being that we would award a “Golden T-Square” to Mort Walker, who drew the Beetle Bailey comic strip. Mort was delighted. We had a nice sponsor in an internet company that was courting us at the time. The 1999 New York Christmas party would be even bigger than the previous year’s Reuben Awards convention in San Antonio.

THE 1999 CHRISTMAS PARTY

The “Century Club” in Manhattan, actually the “Century Association”.

The NCS had long depended on support from the syndicates, especially King Features. When I first started as NCS president, King’s comics editor told me that King was finished with their support for the NCS; he said King didn’t like that the NCS included non-newspaper cartoonist members and he didn’t see what King got out of their longtime support of the NCS. Later I got an angry call from King Features’ chairman who was furiously ranting that he wanted us to cancel the award for Mort because we were stepping on King’s toes; Mort was their guy. I don’t recall saying anything in that crazy phone call; I just listened.

This is Beetle Bailey, from the famous strip by Mort Walker.

On the other hand, Mort was flattered and pleased with the award/party idea, and it was Mort who carried the day. King Features changed their tone after some conversations with Mort and ended up as a second full sponsor for the Christmas party. The double sponsorship let us double the budget and made for quite an opulent evening. I remember that we had a raw bar with all the oysters we could eat, which was fun, and the open bar was freely flowing. Wedding planner glee.

Mort Walker in 2016

King asked to give their “Segar Award” at the Christmas party, an award that King management chooses to give to a King cartoonist; there was a tradition of giving the Segar Award at the King-sponsored-Christmas party, so I said “yes” to King and there were two awards that night. That was my second big issue as president, because many NCSers objected to King giving their own award at the NCS’s party and they aimed their ire at me, complaining that King had “bought” me. Somebody at the party punched somebody else and most people were talking about the punch. And the huge bill for the big party went entirely on Arnold Roth‘s personal tab at the Century Club, which made Arnie nervous when the NCS took too long to reimburse him. (Sorry about that, Arnie.)

But Mort was happy, and it was a great party.

I love Peanuts and Charles M. Schulz was my hero.

PLANNING MY FIRST CONVENTION

The first Reuben Awards convention that I ran as NCS president was in 2000, at the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel in lower Manhattan, but it was originally intended to take place in Santa Rosa, California. The convention was to be a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the comic strip, Peanuts. My predecessor as NCS president, George Breisacher, had been talking to Peanuts creator, Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz and the city of Santa Rosa about having the 2000 Reuben Awards banquet at Sparky’s ice skating rink. Sparky and Santa Rosa were both very generous in their offer to host the convention. George and I flew to Santa Rosa to have dinner with Sparky and his wife, Jeannie, to tour the ice rink and visit the proposed hotel. The hotel was a few miles from the rink, but the city of Santa Rosa offered to cover the cost of busses, and they even offered to have a parade. The ice rink was great fun, and Sparky told us how he had a wood floor that would be installed on top of the ice for the Reubens banquet. We had lovely meetings; Sparky was charming and more than generous, but the problem was the hotel, which would be under construction at that time. With no local hotel alternative that could fit the NCS, and difficult logistics, Santa Rosa didn’t happen. We figured the NCS would do Santa Rosa another year, when the construction at the hotel was completed. I was left scrambling to find a new venue for the 2000 convention. This was actually quite typical for new NCS presidents – planning ahead was not part of the culture for the NCS.

Instead of Santa Rosa, I decided to take the Reubens back to New York, and after a search and competitive bid process, I signed a big contract with the Marriott World Trade Center Hotel, still with the theme of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Peanuts.

Sponsorship for the 2000 Reuben Awards weekend was promised, including a big commitment from United Media, the syndicate that owned Peanuts. Sparky, was going to receive the NCS’s lifetime achievement award on Reuben night and political cartoonist Mike Luckovich had organized most of the newspaper comic strip cartoonists to draw a Peanuts 50th anniversary themed strip on the Saturday of our banquet – then in mid-February, three months before the convention in May, we got the news that Sparky had died.

Arrgh! So sad! And what was I going to do!?

——————————————–

Read more old stuff about my career as a cartoonist on DarylCagle.com

More of When I was President, PART TWO of three

Baptists, Gay Marriage, Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, Bert and Ernie

Answering a College Student’s Questions about Cartoons

Tags Arnold Roth, by All of the Top Cartoonists, Century Association, Charles M. Schulz, Hi and Lois, Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, Mort Walker, National Cartoonists Society, ncs, newspaper comic strips, Reuben Awards, Schulz Retires

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How to Get Out of a Parking Ticket

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 7, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos explains how a cartoonist gets out of a parking ticket.

… a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Cartoonists possess a secret weapon whether they know it or not which will be shown in this little short story.

My wife and I and another couple went out to dinner one night. I was driving. We went to a city next door to us called Norwalk Ct.. There’s a nice little district there which has artists’ studios and interesting restaurants. I parked very close to the seafood restaurant we had selected. I carefully looked around for any “no parking” signs and saw none. It looked like a safe place to park… no restrictions in evidence. No signs at all.

After we finished eating and came back out to the car, there was a big, expensive parking ticket affixed to my windshield. I couldn’t believe it. We all looked around again and saw no signs at all in the vicinity of my car. Just then, a policeman walked past. I rushed over to him and asked about the ticket. He seemed puzzled too. He looked around and confessed that he couldn’t figure out why I would get a ticket there. He advised me to go over to the police station which was close by and pick up a form which I could fill out contesting the ticket.

So, off we went to the police dept. where I picked up said form and then we all went home.

I meticulously filled out the form showing where I was parked, how long I was parked there and the absence of any signs. I turned the form over to see if there was anything I needed to fill out on the other side and… there, I discovered an 81/2″ x 11″” blank expanse of white paper. BLANK WHITE PAPER!! I’ve never been able to resist a nice big, blank piece of paper since I was a little kid. My fingers itched. It was awful hard to resist that beautiful, plain white space. I succumbed!

… I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it …

I decided to illustrate my plight. I drew an elaborate cartoon of my car at the curb with a big parking ticket stuck on the windshield. I drew myself leaping backward aghast and in utter horror at it, slapping my hand to my head, sweat drops popping forth. Our male fellow diner is in the background gesticulating wildly at a confused cop who is scratching his head and looking up and down and sideways trying to see any evidence of signage. Meanwhile, our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street. I put appropriate arrows and labels where needed and turned the sheet back over to put “OVER” down in the lower right corner so they would know to turn it over. I mailed it to the police dept. in the envelope supplied to me and awaited the answer.

… our female fellow diner is trying to revive my wife who has fainted in the middle of the street.

In a few days, I got a letter from the police stating that they were dismissing my ticket. No explanation as to why.

They also said, “Everybody in the station enjoyed your cartoon very much and we have it hanging up on our wall “.

See? … secret weapon.

Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

Tags cartoon, connecticut, Norwalk, parking ticket, police, Randall Enos, windshield

Blog Newsletter Syndicate

The Bohemian Bohemian

Post author By Daryl Cagle
Post date August 2, 2019

My cartoonist buddy, Randy Enos remembers his talented mother-in-law.

She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

Email Randy Enos
Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl

Her name was Tecla Maria Marguarita Kolodziej. She was born in 1913 of Polish and Bohemian/Gypsy parents. When she was 15 years old, she was sent to live in a Catholic girls’ boarding school. She read everything she could lay her hands on. She was a bit of a loner.

She married Jim Walker (English, Irish, Dutch descent). As a young man, Jim was a champion amateur boxer whose trademark move was to rush out at the bell of round one and fell his opponent with one solitary blow. He never lost a fight… not particularly popular with fight fans who perhaps wanted to see a little more action. During World War 2, he was in the last Texas Cavalry troupe which was formed into a tank destroyer unit while Tecla worked as an airplane designer for North American Aviation. Later on she became an assistant to a medical illustrator. She had her own cadaver.

They had one child, Leann ,who I married in 1956. If they had had any other children, I would have married them too.

After the war, Jim worked for the Texas Pacific Railroad as a dispatcher. Tecla had always wanted to be an artist and when she made her first oil painting (shown here in article) which won the first prize at a Dallas Museum of Fine Arts show, an art teacher at the convent told her that someday she should study with Jerry Farsworth. So, she finally made the journey from Texas to Cape Cod to study with the well known painter/teacher. She appeared with their outdoor painting class that summer on the cover of Life Magazine.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait, in the newspaper instead of a photo.

While there on the Cape, she made some friends who invited her to visit them in Westport Connecticut. There she found a community of artists, illustrators, cartoonists, actors and writers. She fell in love with Westport and told Jim all about it. He quit his job, packed up a few belongings, left his car parked on the street in Dallas and took the train with his little daughter across the country to start a new life.

They had decided that since there were so many artists in Westport plus the fact that Jim had been successfully framing Tecla’s paintings, that a Walker Frame Shop might be in the offing. And so it came to be and for many years, it was the only frame shop in town and a fixture on downtown’s Main Street.

By the time I came into the picture, Leann’s parents knew all the famous illustrators, writers and cartoonists in town. Jim used to tell me about his friendship with Orphan Annie’s creator, Harold Gray.

Aside from being a framer and restorer (Tecla was very knowledgeable about old master techniques), she was an outstanding cook who would never let anybody in the kitchen while she was creating her culinary delights. We even got some off-beat appetizers like chocolate covered ants and fried grasshoppers. I couldn’t resist getting her dander up sometimes by proclaiming that, “Food is just fuel!” Regardless, she loved me and I, her. She introduced me to my favorite childhood illustrator, the little known, Martin Burniston who was one of her best friends and she had kick-started my career by hooking me up with Popeye’s Bud Sagendorf, another of her close friends, who hired me into the Famous Artists Cartoon Course thus starting me on the road to cartoonery.

Tecla did lots of self portraits, portraits of friends and portraits of me. I’ve included one of myself here that was painted without my knowledge as she sat on the floor outside my garret studio while I was trying to create a comic strip. At this point in our life we all lived together in a big house. Later we had our own houses but only about a hundred yards apart on the same street. Our kids, on the way home from school, would go through her back yard into her back door, past the big bowl of candy and out the front door and down the street a little ways to our house.

Tecla knew that I kept long hours at the drawing board in those days and often in the middle of the day, I’d get a call. When I answered the phone, all I would hear was one word “STRETCH”! So, now I keep a photo of her in my studio with a word balloon saying “stretch”.

She would never say “hello” when you answered her calls. She would just start in on whatever she was calling about. She was fond of calling me from parties with questions. I’d be in bed and the phone would ring with “What’s the capital of Ecuador?” It’s not that she thought I was particularly smart, but she knew I owned a set of encyclopedias.

When Tecla died in 1993 of cancer (Jim had already passed on), we put her very first oil painting, a self portrait (shown in this article), in the newspaper instead of a photo.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover… and the fake Gainsborough she did. She had an opera singer friend who owned a Gainsborough and had fallen into hard times… she had to sell it. She loved it so much and had gotten so used to living with it that she had Tecla paint an exact copy of it for her. Tecla spent weeks and weeks on the woman’s screened- in porch, meticulously imitating the painting to perfection. She had to paint it at the woman’s house because, of course, she couldn’t let anything that valuable off her premises until the sale.

Tecla only painted for herself with only a very occasional commission like the painting of Simone Bolivar’s mistress Manuella Saenz for a book cover …

Hardly any of the customers who brought their homely little watercolors into Tecla’s frame shop knew of her extraordinary talent in painting. She never entered shows or exhibited anywhere. She was very modest and didn’t discuss her own work with anyone outside of the family.

After she died, we decided that the citizens of Westport should see her work (she would have hated this). Leann and I put up a show of a ton of paintings, drawings, sketches and sculpture in the hallways and corridors of the town hall. The show was up for months and months and hundreds of locals stood agog with their jaws dropped open while they looked at these paintings by a woman they thought they knew.

The one story about Tecla that sticks in the mind was the time that we (Leann and I, our two sons and their girlfriends) were all skinny-dipping in a small river one evening. A police car pulled up near our vehicles up on the road at the top of the river bank. A young cop, large flashlight in hand, descended the bank coming toward us. No one was supposed to swim here… we knew that. He pointed his lamp at Tecla who was emerging from the water stark naked. He said, “Y’know you all have to take off!”

“TAKE OFF WHAT?” Tecla raised her hands in a shrug.

He just laughed and got back in his car and drove off.

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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories: